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Multilingual histories

Is English spelling an insult to human intelligence?

By August 10, 2020106 Comments7 min read20,795 views

One of countless internet memes about crazy English spelling (Source: angmohdan.com)

During a dreary German winter in the 1980s, I would get up early each Friday morning, wrap myself up against the cold, and ride my bike in the morning darkness up “Gallows Hill Street”, where for many centuries the city’s court of justice had been located. My destination was a windowless underground classroom in a 1960s concrete building, where an “Advanced Dictation” class was taking place that was compulsory for all undergraduate students of English.

For 90 minutes each week, we would take dictation of some text, then swap the result of our labors with our neighbor, whose job it was to mark up the errors and tally them while the teacher wrote out the difficult words on the blackboard. Each week, this was an exercise in guessing and humiliation: for instance, how do you spell /ɪndaɪt/ when you hear it for the first time and have only the vaguest idea what it means? Most likely “indite”? Or is it spelled like “night” and “right” and hence “indight”? Or how about /teknɪklɪ/? To spell “technicly” seems obvious enough but wrong, wrong, and wrong again.

There are hundreds if not thousands such words in the English language that you need to know before you can spell them. Understanding the logic of the alphabet and the main sound-letter correspondences still leaves you with a long way to go when it comes to being able to read and write in English.

Most students in the class struggled and we all dreaded the final exam (I passed with a credit, which, by my standards, was disappointingly low).

A student in the class had dug up a quip by the Austrian linguist Mario Wandruszka, who had opined that “English spelling is an insult to the human intelligence.” Being teenagers, we all agreed with the statement and – in a classic case of sour grapes – consoled ourselves with the idea that not doing well in English dictation was in fact a badge of honor that demonstrated our superior intelligence.

Pope Gregory sending St Augustine to convert the people of England to Christianity in 597 (11th c manuscript, British Library)

In the years since, maybe in a case of Stockholm syndrome, I’ve come to adore English orthography. Today, I see it as an intricate system that contains within it the sediments of the innumerous contacts between different languages and cultures that make English such a fascinating language.

Adopting the Latin script

English writing had a design flaw from Day One: adopting the Latin alphabet, which is designed for the sound system of another language, Latin, to English was always going to be a problem – as has been proven innumerable times since the Latin alphabet has been adopted to more languages than any other script (as I explain in this lecture).

When the Anglo-Saxons invaded Britain (ca. 400-700 CE), they brought with them not only their Germanic dialects but also their runic alphabet, which had been designed for the phonology of Germanic languages.

During Christianization the runic alphabet became associated with heathendom, and the Latin alphabet with Christianity. From 597 – the date of Augustine’s mission to Kent – Latin became the language of the new faith and, gradually, the alphabet of the Latin language began to be used to also write English.

Old English was a very different language from what it is today, and with the addition of a few letters, the match between sounds and letters was not too bad in those days, even if the problem of fewer letters than sounds has been a problem of English spelling since the beginning. The classical Latin alphabet had 23 letters, and three were added. These 26 letters now have to cover the 43 phonemes (19 vowels and 24 consonants) of modern English.

The last English king, King Harold, is killed during the Battle of Hastings in 1066 (Bayeux Tapestry)

So, the first story of language and culture contact encoded in English spelling is that of the contact between spoken Germanic dialects and the sophisticated literate world of Latin. It is also the story of adopting a new faith and the fundamental transformation of a culture this results in.

Mixing in French

Old English died in 1066. Although the name “English” suggests continuity, Old English is as different from English as we know it as, say, German or Norwegian.

This is because the Norman Conquest of 1066 brought Old English into intense contact with French. For centuries, a social divide separated English (the spoken peasant dialects) and French (the language of the upper classes, and the language of almost all writing in England during the period).

This medieval social-cum-linguistic divide is still vividly illustrated by Anglo-Saxon-origin terms for animals (e.g., pig, cow, sheep, deer) existing side-by-side with French-origin terms for the meat of those animals (e.g., pork, beef, mutton, venison). That the medieval division of labor was also an ethnolinguistic divide could not be clearer.

By the time “English” started to be used again in writing it was a fundamentally changed mixed language, and spelling conventions that made sense in a Germanic language co-existed, not always easily, with spelling conventions that made sense in French.

The printing press fossilizes spelling

As if all that language mixing was not enough to confuse English writing, the printing press, which was introduced to Britain by William Caxton in 1476, altered the relationship between speech and writing forever.

Caxton’s rant about linguistic diversity (from the Preface to his print of Eneydos)

The idea of orthography – that there is only one correct way to spell – was alien to the medieval mind. Spelling mirrored pronunciation closely and different scribes in different dialect areas spelled differently. Spelling was ultimately a matter of individual preference.

Printing changed that – not only because a standard was more convenient for printers but also because a uniform linguistic product could reach a larger market. Not surprisingly Caxton was one of the first to rail against linguistic diversity when he famously complained that “eggs” were called “egges” in some parts of England but “eyren” in others.

Standardization was born.

Initially, the idea of a standard language only applied to writing, and spoken English continued to be highly diverse.

What happens when spoken language continues to change but writing does not? They drift apart … and you end up with a spelling system that is more in tune with the pronunciation of 500 years ago than contemporary pronunciation. This is particularly true of English vowels whose pronunciation changed considerably between the 15th and 18th centuries in a process called the “Great Vowel Shift.”

The Great Vowel Shift and the stubborn conservatism of printing have created a rift between spoken and written English (Image credit: Wikipedia)

As a result, written and spoken English are today quite different beasts.

Is learning how to spell in English worth it?

Untold numbers of English language learners have, like myself, sweated to learn how to spell in English.

This task has been unnecessarily complicated by the false belief that we were learning an alphabetic script. Systematic letter-sound relationships are the foundation of English spelling but they are complemented by a significant logographic element, where letter combinations are systematically related to morphemes. The triple baggage of adopting an ill-suited alphabet, of mixing two languages and their internal logics, and of separating written from spoken language, has inserted a considerable logographic element (I explain this is in greater detail with the example of <s> as plural marker and <ce> as marker of word-final voiceless /s/ in non-inflected words in this lecture).

Logograms can only be acquired through patient practice, as any Chinese teacher will tell you. However, a knowledge of language history can help make sense of the logographic element. And it is certainly more motivating to understand English spelling in its socio-historical context instead of considering it “an insult to human intelligence.” The reward of learning how to spell is the kind of reading automaticity and speed that characterizes the proficient reader and that is the ultimate point of literacy.

What is your experience with learning or teaching English spelling? And how do you think digital technologies will change English spelling?

To explore further, view the lecture about the spread of the Latin alphabet that goes with this blog post:

Ingrid Piller

Author Ingrid Piller

Dr Ingrid Piller, FAHA, is Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her research expertise is in bilingual education, intercultural communication, language learning, and multilingualism in the context of migration and globalization.

More posts by Ingrid Piller

Join the discussion 106 Comments

  • Jhonny says:

    EJERCICIO 1: Escriba la pronunciación y la traducción de las siguientes palabras
    teniendo en cuenta los mentefactos vistos para los sonidos de las vocales.

    Palabra en inglés Separación silábica Pronunciación Traducción
    Actor ac–tor (actor) Actor
    *The stressed syllable in English is different than the one in Spanish.

    The previous excerpt belongs to the Student’s Workbook from an institution I worked years ago. There, we were supposed to use Spanish as a means to teach English, taking elements such as pronunciation, syllables and sounds of our mother tongue to make English learning “easier”. It challenged everything I had learned before and created many conflicts regarding stress, sounds, phonetics, etc. I ended up showing my students the difference and teaching mainly through the use of IPA notation. My opinion regarding this method matches the thoughts of Mario Wandruszka in regard to English spelling.

  • Siyao says:

    Dear Ingrid,

    Thank you very much for your article. I believe that most Chinese students memorize English words (learn words spelling) by rote memorization when they first learned English, but this method is very easy to forget as long as I do not review it frequently, so after learning phonetic symbols in junior high school, The method I often use to learn spelling is as mentioned in your article, memorizing the spelling of a word based on its pronunciation. When encountering a new word, I will first search for the phonetic symbol of the word from the dictionary app, and then learn the corresponding letter according to its phonetic symbol. It is not only beneficial to read and write in English but also helpful for listening and speaking. The teacher in China also recommends a way of remembering words is the root and affix method because most English words are composed of roots and affixes, for example, the prefix “com-/con-” means “common”, which forms the word “combine, continue”, “-ity” is a noun suffix, which means “nature, state”, and “-ful” is an adjective suffix, which means “full of…”.

    It can be seen from the development and evolution of English that it has never been fixed, but changes with the times (Beaumont, 2021). Therefore, the Internet is just the next natural evolutionary step that is changing the way we learn, teach and communicate. Social media has also created the need for short-term dialects (Akbarov & Tankosiki, 2016), which can be called Textese, Text-speak, Tech-speak, Digi-talk, and Internet slang (Akbarov & Tankosiki, 2016; Singer & Sander, 2012; Drouin & Davis, 2009). In today’s chat apps, we often use abbreviations to replace standard English words, for example, brb is be right back, replacing homophones: gr8 for great, omitting non-essential letters: wud for would, without emphasizing appropriate punctuation and capitalization, resulting in a structural adaptation to the English language (Cingel, & Sundar, 2012).

    References:

    Akbarov, A. & Tankosić, A. (2016). Impact of Social Networks and Technology on English Language Learners. Journal of Linguistic Intercultural Education, 9(3), 7–28. https://doi.org/10.29302/jolie.2016.9.3.1

    Cingel, D. P. & Sundar, S. S. (2012). Texting, techspeak, and tweens: The relationship between text messaging and English grammar skills. New Media & Society, 14(8), 1304–1320. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444812442927

    Douglas, J. (2009). Children who blog or use Facebook have higher literacy levels. Retrieved 28 August, 2012 from http://www.debaird.net/blendededunet/2009/12/uk- study-children-who-blogor-use-facebook-have-higher-literacy-levels.html

    https://www.harvard.co.uk/the-impact-of-technology-on-the-words-we-use/

    • Thanks, Siyao! Rote memorization certainly has its place in English spelling but for beginning readers teaching the sound-letter correspondences would be a more effective way to start.

  • Saraf Anjum says:

    Thank you for such a beautiful, information packed article. I don’t remember struggling with English spelling much. Since I learned English and Bengali at the same time, I didn’t have any preconceived idea of how a language should be or how the spelling doesn’t match the pronunciation. You just write, read or memorize how your parents or the teacher says. Though languages seem to come easy to me, now that I don’t have the fresh, empty brain of a child, it only works in listening and speaking. I gave up on reading and writing Chinese and Korean. Learning to read and write Japanese was not that easy but when it came to Kanji (Chineseee), I totally flopped. Bangla and English are kind of similar to me. Most of the time (and I mean most of the time?) you pronounce what you write 😀 I would say technological advancement has made me duller. I have become dependent on the keyboard apps to show if I have an error or the correct spelling. I don’t use auto correct as it’s annoying and more work than it is worth.

    • Thanks, Saraf! Your concern that technology has made you duller reminds me of Socrates who was also concerned that people would become lazy once they learned how to read and write; and in a way he was right: the memories of literate people are nowhere near as good as those of non-literate people …

  • Jung Ung HWANG says:

    I can remember when I first write down my name in English alphabet by myself and it was around the time when I was first year of primary school. My parents were overjoyed, as if they could jump, saying that a genius had emerged in small island because at that time my family were living in tiny island, and we did not have so many opportunities to learn English rather than at school. I do not have any idea why learning the English alphabet was so fun back in those days despite not only the letters were all twisty but also the pronunciation was way different from Korean. I think the shiny smile from parents kept making me studying English alphabet and go further in spite of its complexity and difficulty. I scribbled down on my English note every day and some basic vocabulary such as ‘apple’, ‘book’, ‘cat’ and so force to remember all the alphabet and its pronunciation, and it worked.

    Of course, there are totally different way of learning alphabet in this digital era. I heard that Korean children learn alphabet YouTube. There are a bunch of videos explaining alphabet and its pronuncication in easy ways on internet.

    • Thank you for sharing this sweet memory!

    • Jhonny says:

      Thanks for sharing this amazing memory, it should have been completely meaningful for your learning. You made me remember how important motivation is for learning, how internal and external factors interact to activate or decline our internal desire for achievement, and how teachers and institutions sometimes skip to check how are students feeling just to focus on what they know, on what they are able to achieve.

  • Em says:

    Thank you for the inspiring article. To be honest, I cannot remember much of the time when I learnt English spelling, but when I think my way of knowing how to spell an unfamiliar word today, I use my mother tongue Finnish a lot as a helping tool. I think the reason is that in Finnish we do have a high letter-sound correspondence which might have been one way of learning how to write English and then we must have learnt the spelling separately – maybe Finnish has also taught me how not to spell a word. This has made the knowledge of how to write a word which someone has said easier for me. Of course, it does not work every time, especially when thinking about more academic words, but I have found this partially unconscious but still functioning method good for every day life situations. Also, I do think the digitalisation has made learning more effective in many ways, and maybe even formed a certain kind of English? For example, the auto-correction is an amazing way of get instant feedback of your writing.

    • Autocorrect is great, except when you use your device in more than one language – I find that the autocorrect on my phone really can turn my messages into a dog’s breakfast …

  • Luna says:

    I started learning English when I was just a kid, and boy, was it challenging at first. The alphabet and pronunciation were tricky for me, especially since Thai has many letters that sound the same but different from English for example, [p] represents “พ, ผ, ป” in Thai. But things began to make sense when I studied phonetics in college. That’s when I started to get a handle on it.
    Currently, digital technologies are having an impact on English spelling. The most common example of this is the autocorrection and spelling checker in Microsoft Word and other technology platforms, which are closely related to everyday life experiences.

    • Thanks, Luna! Glad you found your college phonetics class helpful! What do you mean when you say that automated spell checkers are closely related to everyday life experiences?

  • Tasnim says:

    I learned English when I was very young so I don’t really recall how I learnt it. But during my Bachelor’s, I had an unit on Phonetics and I noticed then how misleading English spelling is. For example: “beat, beet, bit, be it” all sound the same or so similar that it is indistinguishable. There are also “though, through, cough, tough”, all ending with -ough but each having a different pronunciation. Without ‘being drilled’ with the correct pronunciation or without knowing the context, a lot of the English words will be difficult to spell. If we base it on the pronunciation, “cough” should be “kof” and “through” should be “thru”, both incorrect.
    There is also the issue with abbreviations or ‘slangs’ of words used in digital technologies such as social media, which is highly dependent on the internet. There people tend to shorten words, like: from Okay to K, Because to cuz, even cousin is cuz etc. Various people shorten it in various ways, so there are various abbreviations of the same word or the same abbreviation for different words. Over time English spelling will go through a significant change to keep up with the changes in spelling used in digital technologies with the advancement of technologies.

    • Thanks, Tasnim! The effect of different technologies is interesting. Printing effectively stopped changes in English spelling. Digital technologies are much more flexible and might lead to increased change (particularly if more and more people who have not been highly trained in spelling write in English) but automated spell checkers are probably a countervailing force; so I don’t expect a whole lot of changes to English spelling … only time will tell!

      • Tasnim says:

        Ah yes! Thank you Ingrid, I had forgotten about automated spell checkers. But I actually meant it in a way that the newer generation thinks some spellings are a hassle to type so instead of individual changes it might be changes in the spelling of words. Like how in the past the “s” in words was changed with “z” in some places to make it easier to spell and to match with the pronunciation like “apologise” and “apologize”. Also the removal of “u” from some words like “color” and “colour” etc.

  • Logan says:

    I began learning English when I entered middle school in 1993. Strangely enough, the English teacher didn’t teach the alphabet or phonics. Instead, I had regular spelling tests. When the English teacher said a word in Korean, students were asked to write the English word correctly. Driven by a desire to score high, I only focused on spelling and meaning and no effort in pronunciation. I didn’t search for the sound using the dictionary as I was unsure about IPA. It was only when I watched the famous sitcom “Friends” at age 20 that I realized the correct pronunciation of “tongue” is [tʌŋ]. Right, I memorized it as [toŋgju]. What a funny mismatch between letters and sounds!
    I am still having difficulty with English spelling. But with the improvement of digital technology, such as MS Word’s correction function and subtitles, English learners can enhance spelling much easier than 30 years ago. I feel that the Matthew effect on literacy has intensified due to technology. Therefore, teachers need to guide students well. I want to introduce some socio-historical contexts in my spelling lesson when I return to Korea. I appreciate your article and lecture!

    • Thanks, Logan! Love your story about getting a weird pronunciation of “tongue” stuck in your head 😉 and so glad you find the article and lecture useful. I like how you connect spelling to the Matthew Effect – my concern, too, that with the rise of automated writing technologies, we’ll all become poorer readers …

  • Arghavan says:

    I personally do not remember struggling much while learning English spelling. One contributing factor could have been, for instance, my exposure to digital technologies as somebody born in 1996. In my opinion, seeing English lines everywhere on the internet (as English is the main language of the internet) and the modern devices tangling into the basics of our lives will have an immense effect on language learners’ experience. In the end, the English logic of the alphabet and all the correspondence of sounds and letters fascinates me too!
    If I may go broader than English in my own experience, I would say (for obvious reasons which you have thoroughly mentioned above) German language spelling-as a fluent English reader- was a cup of cake for me. However, I cannot say the same about French! It made no sense to me even though I successfully found some patterns after a while, yet it was absolutely frustrating! To be honest, It won’t stop me from trying to speak French in the future even though I might never be interested in reading or writing in French but I’m sure with enough effort, I will be able to find the things that would fascinate me in French written form and logic just like English now that I am aware of the extent it affected English to be the language it is today.

  • Justin says:

    While English spelling is admittedly confusing, my experience with it has been quite smooth, partly because I used to learn how to speak and write in separate settings.

    Arguably, the usual English classroom practice in Vietnam years ago was the traditional grammar-translation method, which feature many grammar and vocabulary exercises. Before printed handouts were easily accessible, we had to copy texts on the board into our notes. This required students to learn the spelling by heart.

    However, the lack of oral practice led to the difficulty in making a pronunciation-spelling connection. Fortunately, my out-of-class self-study aimed to fill this gap. I spent much time listening to tracks while reading the transcripts to build the connection. Later, the knowledge of morphemes and inflections gave me the powerful tool to dissect long English words. For me, as a visual learner, I usually see words as logograms consisting of different parts, and then the pronunciation completes the picture.

    One phenomenon in English spelling nowadays is the increase of abbreviations that should have their own dictionary. Not only are they everywhere in daily text messages but also ubiquitous in all professions. Like we even had a whole seminar deciphering TESOL-related abbreviations in our course!

    • Thanks, Justin! Educational bureaucracies are pretty bad when it comes to abbreviations … I’m not sure it’s a good thing to have so many TESOL-related abbreviations that you need a whole seminar to decipher them … I feel that kind of jargon is often unnecessary and just obfuscates meaning.
      Abbreviations in texting are a different matter but they have actually been losing in importance with the advent of chat services where a long message doesn’t cost more than a short one; personally, I’ve moved away from writing things like “cu l8r” after I was told it makes me seem old 😉

      • Justin says:

        Thanks for your opinion. I think abbreviations and acronyms in professions are inevitable with the growth of new concepts, innovations or organisations. Admittedly, they can be troublesome for people outside of the field – like I wish I could simply say ‘I study Master of TESOL’ without seeing people raise a few eyebrows. Yet everyone knows ‘IT’!

        I actually find abbreviations fun and useful in teaching students the English alphabet, though.

  • Jaehoon Kim says:

    I remember writing down English words over and over again in my notebooks until I was able to speak and write them without hesitation, which became the basis of my English knowledge. One thing I figured out is that back then, my English teachers did not instruct much on the principle of the English spelling. In the name of a test or certain disadvantages such as homework or punishment, the teachers had had students just memorise the words. Interestingly, for me, this drilling actually worked. Fortunately, many of the words still remain in my memory.

    However, with the aid of digital technologies such as automatic completion, sometimes I feel my memory is gradually decreasing, and I found myself relying on this function when I write something important. Just as we no longer have to memorise phone numbers due to the advanced technologies, English spelling may also become such a thing that we do not have to worry about – I actually have no idea if it is a benefit or not-. In addition, abbreviations shortened words, or even wrong words, which are only made for convenience in the online world, might be able to be formalised as correct words.

    Thank you for sharing your interesting article!

    • Thanks, Jaehoon! Age-honored experience proves that drilling is a good strategy for learning certain things, such as spelling … one of the downsides of digital writing supports is that they can take over the basics but humans who don’t master the basics, can’t advance to writing creatively …

  • Pineapplebun says:

    I felt for the writer’s painful journey as I shared a similar experience when I prepared for my English dictations at kindergarten. I felt bad for not spelling the word correctly even though I tried hard to spell and memorise all the words. This feeling haunted me until I could observe a little letter-sound relationship by myself. When I became an English teacher, I received training in phonics. I found this skill very useful for self-learning purposes. But the system of phonics is too complicated for ESL children. It can only be taught at a limited level with simplified interpretation and it might not be effective for everyone.

    Many languages tend to simplify their writing systems over the years. Digital technology seems to have sped up this process. For instance, acronyms, abbreviations and emoticons such as BRB and XO do not require much spelling skills to express ideas. Who could predict what kind of ‘informal’ expressions like this will become commonly accepted in the academic field after many years of transformation? But more certain is that we are getting harder to spell the words correctly with the emergence of auto-correct functions.

    • Thanks! Good points about phonics and it’s limitations. It’s good for beginners but can only take you so far …
      I’m ambivalent about abbreviations because you have to know what they mean before they seem easy; e.g., I had to look up “brb” before I remembered that it’s for “be right back” – hadn’t seen this in a while 😬

    • Laura says:

      While doing a reading activity with my ESL students, I would first ask them to highlight all new words encountered in a given text. Then, after writing them on the board, we would identify the word class as well as work on pronunciation. In the next class, we would do a spelling competition game where I would dictate the vocabulary previously learnt and the students would have to spell the words correctly. From experience, I’ve noticed that students struggle writing words like “technically” or “comfortable” as they contain silent letters.

      As typewriting has pretty much taken over handwriting, a decline in teaching spelling in schools has been observed. In the era of spellcheck and auto-correct, I tend to think that individuals seem to rely more and more on digital technologies to ensure their spelling is accurate. With so many online correctors available nowadays, everyone can get their written work corrected automatically.

      • Thanks, Laura. True about spell checkers. The problem with relying on them and no longer teaching spelling is that the ensuing lack of automaticity will affect reading fluency …

  • Lynn says:

    The main pronunciation problem of English teachers and students in Vietnam is forgetting ending sounds. This leads to misunderstanding for listeners. The post made me think of the time I was in secondary school. We had a dictation lesson. When my teacher said /ˌɪnˈsaɪ/, it confused me a bit, I did know if it was ‘’inside’’ or ‘’insight’’. I was not confident to ask my teacher and I kept silent. In high school, I realised that to enhance English spelling, I needed to be good at pronunciation. Because there is a link between them, for example, ea, ee, ese, ie… can be pronounced as /i:/. So, I wrote everything carefully in my notebook and kept it as my treasure until now (as in this sample image).
    When I came to Australia, I had an Aussie friend, and he texted me ‘’G9, m8’’. It took me a whole night to figure out what it meant. It means ‘’Goodnight, mate’’. I felt like, wow, it was interesting, how can people invent that, very short and teenage.
    Regarding the second question, it is challenging to state whether digital technologies will change English spelling. However, they will make us less active and dependent on them. For example, using Microsoft Word predicts the words we are typing and even corrects our spelling. But there is a positive aspect. We can use digital technologies to practice pronunciation and English spelling. From my learning English experience, I took advantage of using an online dictionary. I used the record button, spoke to it, and it showed every word on the screen to check my spelling and pronunciation. It was an effective way to practice English before the IELTS test.

  • Chloe Ng says:

    English spelling is challenging to learn and to teach to be honest. As an English learner, I’ve had some common mistakes in my writing, which derive from the difference between English sounds and its writing system. Until now, I sometimes have spelling mistakes such as convenient- convinient, achieve- acheive, separate- seperate,… Even though I pay much attention to those words, it seems like the connection between some letters and sounds was formed in my mind when I started to learn English, which makes me write as a habit until now. Let’s take some basic English words that beginners usually learn as examples. I kept in mind that “ei” is pronounced /i:/ when I learnt “receive” or “i” is pronounced /i/ in “live”, “e” is pronounced /ə/ in “summer”. Therefore, it is a bit difficult for me to change when I realise that a sound can represent different letters in English.
    Now, when I teach pronunciation, it is really hard for me to answer the questions like “Why don’t we write “stedy” instead of “study”, because”e” is pronounced /ə/ in “summer “. It is quite challenging for my Vietnamese students to write correctly in English because they are familiar with the writing system of letter and sound correspondence. However, it is a surprise to me when some students of mine find English homophones interesting. Even though it’s difficult for them to recognise the words separately, they like the challenge when it requires them to guess words based on the other words used in the same clause/ sentence.
    In this digital era where language contact has more chances to occur via social network, I think that English in the future might accept more different types of spelling than just American English and British English (labour- labor). As English belongs to the world, people might accept different spellings when many words are now pronounced differently due to speakers’ accent and intonation.

    • Interest in homophones is a bit nerdy – can totally relate to those students of yours 🤓
      Re your point that English spelling will become more and more diverse. I think that’s probably true but it’s difficult to know whether that’s a good thing or not. Diversity and recognition are desirable, of course, but a uniform written language has real benefits in terms of reading fluency and knowledge sharing…

  • Brownie says:

    When I saw my little cousin practicing spelling for Spelling Bee competition in his school. I asked myself that why this activity is challenging enough to become a competition as this kind of contest is not held for my language – Vietnamese. Through the reading and lecture, I realised that it is difficult because the mismatch between pronunciation and spelling. For example, when my aunt practice with my cousin, the sound /ə/ was so confusing because it can be the sound for letters e, i, or o. Sometimes, homophones are also a problem, and he asked for the meaning of that word to avoid misspelling.

    With the development of digital technologies, I think spoken English, especially through social media platforms, will be growing up with more new loan-words. Loan-words is from the different pronunciation and writing systems, so when they come to English alphabet, they will be adapted and the mismatch between pronunciation and spelling will become bigger. For instance, the word “balut” is from Filipino. The first time when I saw it, I think it can be pronounce / ˈbælʌt/ like “a” in “cat” and “u” in “cut”. However, it is pronounced / baˈlut/. The sound for “a” is /a/ not /æ/, and the sound for “u” is /u/, not /ʌ/.

    • Spelling bees are such a great example – a literacy practice specific to English! As you say, for many other languages, a spelling bee competition simply wouldn’t make sense …

  • Japanda says:

    When I started to learn English spelling in Year 3, I was very confused by the differences from Roman letters which I learned the year before. I still remember asking my English teacher and my mother why people spell “how” in place of “haw” when I was learning “How are you?”. They just told me that it was better to remember the spelling since those two were different. I followed their advice and I became used to memorizing English spelling without any hesitation. I was faced with the same problem as a teacher, and I simply reproduced what I experienced as a student. However, thanks to this article, especially the section about the printing press, I think I can answer the question now.

    Digital technologies make us pay less attention to English spelling. Misprints are automatically corrected or indicated with a red underline on Microsoft Word. I think English spelling will not change, but soon (or even now), people will make a document with a lot of spelling errors if they are asked to write by hand.

    • Thanks, Japanda, for sharing your own experiences. It’s true that machines can spell for us these days but we still need to learn how to spell so that we can identify words and become fluent readers …

  • Abed says:

    English spelling will forever be haunting me and my students. As a teacher. I find myself helpless to explain the anomaly of English spelling rules. In my teaching context, my students and I share the same first language which is Arabic. In Arabic language, the spelling system is more systematic. In the previous lecture in Literacies, I started to appreciate my first language more. Although Arabic considered one of the hardest language to learn, it not as hard to learn to spell as English. Abjad system of writing seems to me way easier to comprehend and follow for new learner. To answer your second question, I could not type this comment without the help of auto correction. It even took me a moment to remember how to spell Literacies!

    • Thanks, Abed! Glad to hear that the class contributed to your greater appreciation of Arabic 🙂 … we’ll hear a bit more about the mixed logics of English spelling as we go along and I hope that will be useful to you and your students.

  • Brynn says:

    Love this! My L1 English 7-year-old daughter is constantly frustrated with English spelling at the moment. I’ve even trained her to finish the sentence “English is…..” with “tricky!” when she gets upset that an English word isn’t spelled the way it sounds like it should be. Since both she and my 10-year-old son are (like most kids) really into the idea of dinosaurs and fossils, I’ve taught them to think of English spellings as fossils of past languages and how fun it is when we can “dig them up” and see the remnants of pronunciations that are hundreds of years old. It doesn’t work every time, and there is still plenty of frustration as they learn to spell in their first language, but I’ve found this to be a useful strategy to mitigate too many tears!

  • Vatnak says:

    Thanks so much for more information related to the history of Latin alphabets. I do agree that there is a mismatch between the phonology and the writing system in English. Thus it often causes me some problems when writing. However, I believe that learning the languages which follow the Latin alphabets is way easier than those which follow different kind of drawing like Chinese. It reminds me of how struggle I was when studying Chinese as I needed to write each words many time and see them more often in order to remember them. Also, I find that I forget how to write Chinese characters easily. As in English, I can at least depend on the sound more, and just try to notice where the exceptions happen.

  • KINZA ABBASI says:

    Hi Ingrid. In my grade College , I remember I had given presentation on “Ambiguities in English Language” , Although my presentation wasn’t based on research at that time, it was more based on y experiences in learning English language particularly spellings and words. The ‘tripple baggage’ as you call it , makes it hard to learn spellings for most of the words in English. But still I believe in order to achieve the high literacy level in English language it is very important to learn the spellings . As you hinted spellings explain the socio-historical context of the process of linguistic evolution. However, the spellings have been altered a great deal due to digital technology. The communication between people has increased a lot and as you said, it is fossilising English spelling a great deal. The standardisation is accomodating new spellings pronunciations depending on the digital service we are using . For instance, the social media chat is removing the unnecessary letters from the word while only communicating the major phoneme like message is written as msg. we can assume that in coming years the language would become b=more precise and direct .

    • I think the jury is still out on what digital technologies will do to English spelling but precision and directness are different order categories. Digital communication can be both direct and indirect, and anything in between…

  • Stefan D. says:

    Hi Ingrid,
    Greetings from your Upper-Austrian colleague working on the other end of world!
    I’m pro spelling reform and was VERY surprised how few colleagues (in the historical field) see value in it. I’ve seen how much time the kids need to spend to learn pair, pear, pare, their, there, they’re – and these are only the simpler cases – and I think the time can and should be used for more meaningful things such as intercultural learning, conflict resolution and, yes, world peace. Life is short, even for the kids. The historical linguist in me will be a bit sad, but that’s a sacrifice one has to make for something we do need: a 21st century spelling for a 21st century English (the present one worked fine in the 14th century). Thanks for this nice piece. Nice blog, too. Well done!

    • Danke, Stefan, fuer Deinen Kommentar! My sense is that spelling reform will not take off precisely because life is short. While memorizing stuff like “pair, pear, pare” takes time, imagine how much time it would take to get all the key stakeholders in global English(es) to agree on spelling reform and then for well over a billion English users (who have already learned how to spell English) to wrap their heads around the reform … I mean die deutsche Rechtschreibreform was a much smaller project and hasn’t exactly been a success …

      • Stefan D. says:

        I think there’s a way. It might have to go via the national school boards – or state/provincial ones in concert in one country at a time. Norway did it, they even afford two spelling systems. And even the German-speaking countries did it (and you know what I think of their linguistic approaches to German). It would need to be a measured approach, for sure, and would require very smart and skilled proposals and, as far as I could tell from my discussion with HEL folks, only one in 10 linguists would probably be able to contribute gainfully to such a project. Like the ss/ß rule, I’m sure we could tacke the 20 most annoying and destructive things in English spelling and offer remedies. Perhaps it results in more tolerane (if you say “their bus” or “they’re bus”, is all the same to me, some might come out of it). On the other hand, now might be the time to do it: what better time than to restart the economy by reprinting the early school readers and texts: what a boost to the economy, if done right. Everybody has the right to not spell like Chaucer unless they speak like him! 😉

        • Such a project would certainly be a fantastic exercise in intercultural learning and conflict resolution … 😉 … let me know if you take the lead; I’d be happy to help out 🙂

  • Enkhzaya Regzendorj says:

    Thanks again for your interesting lecture. It is so great to know the English script development.
    As English is my second language, always find spelling bit hard when it comes to longer, double consonants or medical term words. Recently I have been realizing how my spelling has gotten worse because I haven’t written academic writing for the last several years before studying at MQ and thanks to technology it is helping me to recur English spelling and making me think I need to practice constantly. As the Mongolian language, we have Cyrillic script very similar to Russian. Our spelling in Mongolian is much easier than English because we pronounce each letter so it is not hard to write what we hear. English still bit confusing when there are silent letters and other exceptions.

  • AlexH says:

    Hi Ingrid and everyone!
    As a person whose L1 is Spanish and L2 is English, I remember having trouble with spelling some words correctly when I first started learning the language as a child. I remember having such difficulty with “neighbor” (the American spelling) and “eighteen” that my teacher would encourage me to write lines of these words as homework. It was tedious for me since each letter has a sound in Spanish and, well, this does not happen in English. Learning new words and being able to pronounce them but having to spell them correctly in written form was such a tremendous task back in the day. In hindsight, I think my teacher’s decision helped me to learn these words by heart…however, whenever I learn a new word, I now try to memorise the spelling!

  • Claire says:

    English suddenly makes a lot more sense now…
    As an ESL teacher I have often been asked by perplexed, frustrated and sometimes outraged students why, WHY is a particular word spelt that way? Why is English spelling so difficult?? To which my (not very satisfactory) response has always been: because English is a stupid language. I vaguely knew there was a better, historical explanation as to why English spelling seems to defy common sense, but it always seemed easier just to throw my hands up in the air, acknowledge the futility of trying to understand such a ridiculous language, and move on with the lesson.
    Now, thanks to this week’s fascinating article and lecture, I feel much better equipped to answer the perennial question “but why?” My answer now would be: because English is a stupid language… but isn’t it great?

    • Telling learners that what they are learning is stupid seems a bit demotivating to me … how about you tell them in future “because it is not a computer code but a natural language; and like any natural language it carries the baggage of the long and complex history of its users and uses” 🙂

  • Ally says:

    Thank you Ingrid for another fascinating lecture and article. English spelling is indeed bizarre and understanding the history of the Latin alphabet it makes sense, why it often doesn’t make sense. I always feel lucky English is my first language because I am not sure I could learn it easily and have much admiration for those that do so as a second language. Spelling in English comes easily for me as I have always read a lot and I have a visual memory so I can recognize if a word looks correct. However, there are words I often spell incorrectly such as your and you’re and its and it’s and these are not words spell check will change correctly. On the other hand I struggle tremendously to learn French, the spelling, word order and grammar are painful to learn. I found learning Japanese a much easier and more enjoyable experience as it seemed more logical somehow.

    I find it interesting how some languages, like both French and Japanese to some extent, attempt to keep their language “pure” and keep out or mark foreign words. Japanese uses a different alphabet, katakana for foreign words. In French, the counting system is really crazy. For example, 90 you need to do math its like quatre-vingt – dix ie 4 – 20 -10. In Switzerland and Belgium they have adapted the modern style which is much easier and more logical ie 90 = nonante but the French have resisted this change and kept the traditional system.

    I think technology influences language in interesting and sometimes useful ways as many people mentioned , the very handy spell check, and the use of abbreviations like lol and emojis. I do think that to some extent there has always been formal and informal language, both spoken and written, and in my opinion there is a place for both of these. I think texting language emoji and abbreviations are all a kind of informal slang that is popular now and every time has had some form of this, it changes and evolves with each new generation. There is also a big difference between the spoken word and the written word. I have a friend who is an author and is a great storyteller. However, he writes the way he speaks and it really doesn’t work, he cannot get his books published despite the excellent story because of how they are written.

    In my opinion, for us to curl up and enjoy losing ourselves into a story on the page, a book needs to be well written to a certain standard, to flow and to be error free, otherwise we are pulled out of our experience repeatedly. Poetic prose also take certain forms, some may be free form, and these forms make the words and message accessible to the reader. The essay is another formal way of writing with a very specific audience in mind. So I think when we are writing the most important thing we have to ask ourselves is who our audience is, then we can choose they best way to write, to access this audience and get our message across.

  • Thi Loan NGO says:

    Thank you so much for this informative blog, Ingrid! I DO enjoy it and LOVE it because i feel so related with this blog, similar experience of learning foreign languages. It reminds me of my time doing bachelor, a double degree of learning French and English at the same time. Now, when i look back, i can’t stop laughing because of how silly i was in the past. You know, as what you said in the blog, there are many words in English and in French similar such as information, dialogue, exact,… and the point is that the pronunciation is totallly different. There was more than once i pronounced these words with French rule in English class and vice versa. And also, i learned English before French, therefore, sometimes i applied rules for English pronunciation in French class. For example, Porc in French is Pork in English. We do not spell /k/ sound in French but i always did it at the early stage of learning French :))) Thing didn’t stop there. For the first year of learning French, i shared similar experience of dictation class in French with yours. And if you paste this sentence “Le ver vert va vers le verre vert” (means The green worm goes to the green glass) on google translate with the speaker on, you’ll got my point :)) They proununce all the same /ver:/ . Again, thank you very much, a lovely flashback of learning languages journey.

  • Audrey says:

    I find English spelling complicated but never knew the story behind it. Sometimes I watch English competitions such as Spelling Bee on TV and feel grateful that English is not my first language. For Vietnamese language, there are rules to justify how to write down alphabets and six tones. In contrast, because of its multiple origins, English spelling is complex, and spelling rules are far from a simple alphabetic-sound correspondent. Honestly, I often make several spelling mistakes in writing. Words like “complement” and “compliment” have different spellings and meanings but the same pronunciation; or when to double consonants always confuses me. And the situation is even getting worse since I use my keyboard more often than pen and paper nowadays. I become dependent on autocorrection, and it replaces words before my brain can register. Many proposals to change English spellings have been ventured to make it simpler and more rationally consistent. I think it is unlikely that a complete spelling and orthography reform would be possible because English is spoken in many different nations with different spelling standards.

    • Thanks, Audrey! You are right – spelling reform is an unlikely proposition for as diverse and widely-used a language as English. Any gains in consistency would be far outweighed by the practical challenges of re-learning and re-coding on such a large scale …

  • T says:

    Thank Ingrid for this interesting lecture! I started learning English as a second language in elementary school and until now, I usually confused by English spelling. As I know, a lot of native speakers find it confusing too. Some words are too difficult to spell. In order to memorize words that I have trouble spelling, I often write them down so many times.
    I’m a big fan of classic board games like Scrabble. I can practice spelling, learn new words, and have fun with friends at the same time. I have the digital version of the game on my phone and play it frequently.

    • Games are priceless for spelling! I’m a huge fan of trainchinese, a tetris-like game where you basically take dictation of ever-more complex and ever-faster characters…

  • Chalermkwan Nathungkham says:

    Thank you so much for this interesting topic. From my experience, I start learning to spell when I was in primary school. At that time, I truly said that it doesn’t make me enjoy or be interested in it. But when I start learning a bachelor’s degree in English major, I was more interested in the ‘Great vowel shift’ and the history of it. However, I have known that many words of English borrowed from French, I clearly understand when I learned French (in a short lesson). Some words and pronunciation in both languages are pretty similar. As Thai words, there are some loanwords from English as well such as apartment, giraffe, and Taxi, but the pronunciation may change following ’Thai’ people’s accent such as apartment will be ‘a-pháat-mén’, Giraff will be ‘yii-ráap’ and Taxi will be ‘táek-sîi’. In terms of changing English spelling by technologies, I absolutely agree with you at this point. Because nowadays there are many ways to connect or to communicate. May be texting is an old type of communicating, so they will use briefly word or sentences for making easier and ending quickly. But those words are quite interesting for me and I have learned more words when I texted with my foreign friend. Now I’m finding further information about Thai loanwords and from English and some abbreviations. See, languages fascinate me all the time.

    • Thanks for your enthusiasm! I think everything you invest a lot of time to learn grows on you. The challenge for us as teachers is to start that virtuous cycle of ever increasing fascination ☺️

  • Yuta Koshiba says:

    From my learning experience, I was confused about writing spelling correctly many times when I started learning English in junior high school. This because I learned Roman characters to type the Japanese language on a computer at elementary school. The spelling of Roman characters and English was very similar, such as “Orenji” and “Orange”. I practiced a lot for spelling correctly in junior high school. I thought that learning English spelling was very difficult for Japanese people because Japanese and English characters were different. In my opinion, the difficulty of learning English spelling is one of the reasons why Japanese people have a dislike for learning English.

    As digital technologies have been developed, many people can write easily correct English spelling to convey their idea. They do not have to remember all the English spelling because of technology. Therefore, digital technologies can be thought of as reducing people’s anxiety about spelling when expressing their opinions.

    • Thanks, Yuta! Judging from the popularity of this post, the Japanese are not alone in disliking English spelling 😉

    • Peter O'Keefe says:

      Thanks for another interesting post which will help greatly to explain the alphabet and English spelling to students from now on. I really liked the part about the great vowel shift. Wish I had learned things like this in High School English classes!

      It is interesting to see the logographic connection to English writing. Before this blog post, I had never thought of it. Yet in my own experience of learning to spell (going back to the 2nd grade of primary school) I remember “visualising” the words rather than “sounding” them. Teaching English in Japan I have noticed that usually students learn to spell pretty well. After reading Yuta’s post however, perhaps this amounts to a lot of hard practice! Because English and Japanese are such distant languages, you would expect to see more trouble in this area and actually I think the root of Yuta’s problems were in relearning “katakana” English (e.g. “orenji” for orange). It is perhaps harder to “re-learn” spelling than simply to learn a new word we have never encountered before. However most Japanese students are talented “visualisers” given the nature of their own writing system which includes kanji, and I think this helps a lot of them with English spelling. Chinese characters require our “photographic” memory which I think is what is required in English. I can see this more clearly after learning about the logographic connection.

      Peter

  • Lilly says:

    Thank you, Ingrid, for another very informative post. I have heard that English borrow plenty of words from French, however, I never knew it is influenced by German too. When I was in secondary school, one of my best friends started learning German. She told me to take a look at her textbook and guess the meaning of the words based on what I had known in English. Though there were many differences in spelling, I was able to guess the words when I read them out loud (E.g. bier, karotte, gras, insekt). The post is very interesting, I can’t wait to read the next one. Thank you!

    • Thanks, Lilly! One of the big lessons of language history is that people have always moved around and learned from each other. Two of your examples (beer, insect) come from Latin and both German and English borrowed these words independently. ‘Gras’ is a common Germanic word, and ‘carot’ is the most interesting: both English and German borrowed the word from French in the Middle Ages; French got it from Latin, which got it from Ancient Greek καϱωτόν (karotón) …

  • Christina says:

    What a fascinating article once again Ingrid. From my experience, learning English spelling and teaching English spelling are two different forms that have evolved over the years. I learnt English throughout my primary and high school days, whereby the systems that were enforced then have changed dramatically to now. The English language alone is complicated from its origins, however, teaching English spelling phonetically seems to be assisting learners. I believe digital technologies will play a major role in the evolution of English spelling, specifically with my generation or younger ones altering words or combining them into abbreviations, i.e. terms such as lol (laughing out loud), ikr (I know right) etc. which did not exist a generation ago. With this evolution, I believe spelling will be a thing of the past and the real focus will be trying to decipher texts with these abbreviations.

  • Han says:

    The origin of English, German, French and many other languages was Latin Alphabet. Therefore, I guess theses three languages had already had similarities in a certain extent. Unfortunately, I have not known about French, but I still save some fragments of German in my brain.
    Admittedly, German and English are quite different language systems. However, in my vague memory, some of the pronunciation and spelling of German vocabulary, such as “Schokolade”(chocolate), may be analogous to English so that I cannot help considering whether learners can study more language effectively through taking advantages of linguistic similarities.
    I believe that the development of digital technology will promote the expansion of English more clearly due to the spelling autocorrector of electronic equipments, yet I am a little worried about that people would be over dependent on spelling checker, which results in lacking of the ability to hand writing.

    • Thanks, Han! The Chinese word (巧克力, qiǎokèlì) for ‘chocolate’ is also similar 🙂 … in fact, the word for ‘chocolate’ is similar in most of the world’s language because it goes back to the word “xocolātl” in Nahuatl, an indigenous language of Mexico. Until the 16th century, the cacao plant was only known and cultivated in Central and South America … colonialism spread it around the world

  • Nusrat Parveen says:

    It was really interesting to know the origin of English! Knowing that English is adopted from Latin and it has influence from German Dialect and French writing and it is logogram too! Now it all makes sense of its complex spelling structure. When I learnt English in my elementary school, I had to memorise spelling, we followed few spelling rules and basically learnt it by repeated practice. I remember we had to increase our bank of vocabulary by learning correct spelling and sometimes even not knowing the meaning of it. Now when I teach spelling/ reading/writing to Kindergarten children we start from letters and sound and ask students to write the sounds that they can hear. If they spell the word wrong, we consider it as a learning process. We also have high frequency sight words that students should learn from kindergarten. But when I check upper grade writing I still find a lot of spelling mistake, even the basic words that they supposed to master by the end of Kindergarten! Most mistakes are mainly not understanding letter and sound relationship and not following spelling rules!
    My observation is now in modern days due to technological invention of auto correction and use of devices have decreased our efficiency in spelling, but it has definitely increased the speed in our writing. Now without devices if I write a document, I know I will have to stop several times to fix my spelling error! Also, a new trend is emerging due to use of texting and social media abbreviations which will probably be a new type of writing to research in future!!

    • Thanks, Nusrat! There is an interesting tension between reading and writing: it may be faster to spell with typos and errors but the writer’s gain will be the reader’s loss as all those typos and errors will slow down reading speed …

  • G says:

    To me, I found English spelling quite easy to learn because Vietnamese alphabet is to some extent closely linked to Latin alphabet. However, some Vietnamese loanwords from English seems to cause confusion, mispronunciation if I rarely encounter them in daily conversation. For example, Vietnamese pronunciation and spelling for “golf” is “gôn”, “mannequin” is “ma nơ canh”. Besides, I also misspelled some words such as “message” and “massage” or “amature” for “amateur”, “halumi” for “halloumi”.

    In relation to the impact of digital technologies on English spelling, I think the emergence of teen code, emojis, or abbreviations such as XOXO (hugs and kisses) or LOL (laughing out loud) will enrich and make standard English more diverse.

    • Thanks, G! I can’t imagine that “XOXO” or “LOL” will ever make it into academic essays … so not sure about your prediction that standard English will become more diverse. My take is that the variation that is typical of the spoken language (e.g., formal vs informal) will also make its way into writing.

  • Subin says:

    Hello Ingrid, thank you for posting an interesting topic this week as well. After reading this post, I also remembered the experience that English spelling was quite difficult and complicated. When I first learned English, it was harder than I thought to figure out the difference between ‘a’ and ‘e’, which are similar to Korean language. In Korean language, two vowels have similar pronunciations, but the orthography is divided into ‘ㅐ’ and ‘ㅔ’. So, since the pronunciation and spelling of the two vowels are similar, I was often confused when dictating sentences when I was young. Also, the fact that there are more silent syllables when pronouncing words or sentences aloud than in Korean also caused me confusion in dictation.

    • L2 spelling adds an extra layer of challenges because the phonology of our first language gets in the way … best to look at the bright side and figure our bilingual strategies, as Moni has suggested 🙂

  • Moni says:

    Another interesting lecture and very informative article Ingrid!
    When it comes to spelling in English, I can proudly say that most of the time I do not really have any doubts about how to spell a word because in my head I spell it using polish sounds of the letter. That’s how I learnt and it helps me, so if it’s a long word like for example “a professional” I spell it out in my head in a polish way and I know exactly what letter comes one after another. However, I am quite bad if I have to spell the word out loud in an English manner, I only know how to spell my name and phone number, if I have to spell out another English word verbally I have to write it down first, using my polish way haha.
    When it comes to dictation it is very popular in Poland in the polish language class to perform dictation tests. Polish letters and polish sounds are pretty much the same, so spelling out loud is easy the problem appears when the person needs to write down a particular word that includes the sound that can be written both ways, but only one is grammatically correct. For example “rz” and “ż” sound the same but in the word “żaba” only the second sound is grammatically correct.

    • Great strategy! Bilingualism is so useful in so many ways 🙂 … but how do you deal with “silent letters” and all those other pesky irregularities of English?

  • Sue says:

    History of writing systems is really fascinating from every perspective that we look at it. I agree that English spelling system is quite complicated, however as I have also French, I guess theirs is a bit more complex and more difficult to learn as a foreign language. Maybe because English has borrowed many words from French and it makes it as complex?! Moreover, English, just like many other language, is constantly changing and becoming more modern; and technology plays a significant role in this change and creation of new ways of using a language and has accelerated the process.

    • Thanks, Sue! Agree – my French dictée classes were almost as bad as the English dictation classes …

      • Jhonny says:

        Delving into the evolution of languages that adopted the Latin alphabet for improved communication and wider written dissemination is truly captivating. My understanding of Spanish’s development from Latin deepened, thanks to insights from a Latin Bible and my mom’s school experiences. This journey also unveiled the intricate ties between religion, language, and the role of writing in colonization, notably in the Americas. It highlighted the imposition of Catholicism as the universal truth and the suppression of alternative beliefs. As an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher, this lecture offers valuable insights for addressing students’ inquiries about the differences between English pronunciation and word structure compared to Spanish.

  • Kyohei says:

    Thank you for posting such an interesting and fascinating topic. The importance of English spelling was dramatically changed when I started studying in a university in Japan. When I was a secondary school student, I recognised that the spelling is not significantly important because there were not many opportunities to learn writing skills and to write essay or reports. However, once I entered into the university, I was asked to write reports, essay and manuscripts for presentation. I obviously needed to use the correct spelling for them to make readers understand easily. Thus, I noticed that the spelling helps people to communicate with each other without any confusion and misunderstanding.

    However, as digital technology has been developed, many people may come to forget the correct English spelling since they do not need to type a full spelling of words due to the predictive input function. It may also change the spelling itself because there are already some written language for only digital technology, for instance “BTW (by the way)” and “Q4U (question for you)”.

  • Tazin Abdullah says:

    Hi Ingrid! It is fascinating to read the history and the context in which the English script developed.
    My most recent experience with spelling has been watching my children learn how to spell. Skrach (scratch), accidently (accidentally), leppard (leopard) are some examples that I can recall. They assume that, as native speakers, both their grammar and spelling are always correct! But I think they were taken by some surprise when they spent time with their American relatives and realised they all speak the same language but spell differently. And if they tried to spell based on their individual pronunciations, they would encounter several varieties. I think this is one of those situations where the historical contexts of the variations of spelling might be helpful!

    I notice their spelling also varies, depending on which digital platform they use. When they are submitting school work, they are quite vigilant but the chat messages to friends are full of abbreviations (thnx, cya) and they also seem to be free to invent new spellings in that exchange!

    • Thanks, Tazin! Watching children learn language (every aspect of it!) never ceases to amaze! Chat messages are another interesting cross-over genre that is written but works more according to the logic of speech …

  • Monica says:

    I’m still getting my head around the idea of a fixed spelling system being alien to the medieval mind – this is something I can barely imagine!

    As the parent of a bilingual English-German speaking primary school aged child, I noticed that my daughter found it easier to read in German than in English. She reads both languages well, however reading and spelling in German have been far easier for her to pick up even though she operates in English in her day-to-day life. She struggles less to read new words in German as the spelling and pronunciation are more consistent than in English.

    I agree that digital technologies such as spell checkers make it less likely that there will be fundamental changes to English spelling as they carry an authority which is rarely questioned. How we spell depends very much on the context I which we write though. When it comes to texting, spelling conventions fly out the window and there is a high tolerance for simplifications and alternative spellings.

    • Thanks, Monica! I’ve also raised an English-German bilingual child, and agree that the German spelling system is so much easier – initially, that is … because there comes a point when the logic of the spelling system no longer matters and what matters is automaticity that comes through sheer quantity. I.e. the more you read, the more fluent you’ll be, no matter how awful the system. That’s one of the huge (and under-appreciated) challenges of bilingual literacy: to read and write a lot in both languages; and that’s why bilingual schooling is so important! More on this important topic later in the term 🙂

  • vichuda says:

    Hello and thank you for writing this article.
    I have heard of the great vowel shift and still everytime i come across this, i can’t help but think that ‘should i be grateful for that vowel revolution to happen?’ because the word ‘duck’ can read as /dʌk/ and not /dʊk/. Although my friend told me that when he went to the northern part of england, a waiter asked him if he want a dʊk. I want to believe that this revolution was to make english language easier; afterall one of the reasons english could become lingua franca is because it is counted as an easy language to learn right? Well, I would like to disagree to my thought now. 😂

  • Yudha Hidayat says:

    I have two points:
    1. What I found fascinating from this reading is I just realised that writing becomes a source for standardised spelling of a language or languages.
    2. In the first time I learned English spelling, I thought I was learning “alien language”. English spelling is much more complicated than the Indonesian language even though both of them use Latin alphabet. English has 43 phonemes (19 vowels and 24 consonants) while Indonesian language has only 33 phonemes consisting of only 7 vowels, 3 diphthongs, and 23 consonants. It was very frustrating when it came to spelling and pronunciation. The clear example is the POTATO you provide above. Another example is the word island. How on earth the sound ‘s’ disappear when we pronounce it? Indonesian language pronounces all of the letters, but not English. However, English language challenges me and I accept the challenge.

    You can open this site for the Indonesian language phoneme https://eudl.eu/pdf/10.4108/eai.13-8-2019.2290196

  • Banie says:

    To me, spelling is just one of the aspects of productive language knowledge, not a reflection of intelligence. Probably, it doesn’t matter when you don’t get the full meaning of a certain word, but it does when you misspell a word as everyone notices. It is still important to spell correctly to be successful in academic or employment domains. For example, I sometimes find certain words hard to spell, so I tend to rely more on less academic vocabulary in writing (‘at the same time’ rather than ‘simultaneously’), which can reduce the quality of my written assignments. However, thanks to the Internet, I can check quite quickly how a word is spelt, how academic it is via online dictionaries, which aids me in solving the problem effectively.
    G9 = good night; U2 = you too; 2morrow = tomorrow; ttylt = talk to you later. Do these phrases belong to another new kind of English language whose key focus is on speed of writing? 😊
    P/s: Oops! I may have made some spelling mistakes in this post as well…

    • Thanks, Banie! Good point about technology! The kind of advanced dictation training I did in the 1980s certainly has lost a lot of relevance today. With convenient access to all those tools you mention, why should we stuff our brains with spelling rules? 🙂

  • Chris says:

    English spelling sure is complicated compared to many other languages I’ve been in contact with. However, just realising the context of the language, and the history of its historical language contacts, it makes sense, in my opinion. English has borrowed so much vocabulary from French, and because of this, perhaps integrated the complex spelling system?
    Because of the printing press, and how standardised English spelling has become, I doubt we would see any major changes to it anytime in the near future. One would maybe argue that written language develops slower in modern times than early days? It would make sense, anyway. Also, considering the global scale of which English is used, it would be especially hard to make one big standard way of spelling things; there are so many varieties that would spell words differently (just look at British English vs American English!)
    I do think modern technology affects English to a certain degree, however, as you would see simplified spellings of words in “Internet slang”. But more so, new words introduced to the language will most likely be simpler to spell, than if they were introduced a couple hundred years ago.

    • Thanks, Chris! I agree that language change has slowed down because of we all are exposed to so much more written language. And Microsoft spellchecker certainly is a force for conservatism in the written language, as I just said in the tutorial. But, contradictory forces apply, too, and the fact that there are so many second language speakers probably pulls spoken English into trajectories of accelerated language change …

  • Yuan Li says:

    I started to systemically learn English when I was in my primary school (actually the kindergarten teachers would teach us several words, and my mom also taught me at a very young age). Personally speaking, I don’t think English spelling is a nightmare but interesting. I always had dictation tasks from the primary school to university as I majored in English in my bachelor’s degree. Although sometimes, I still find it hard to pronounce a sound in a word without an alphabet because a same letter may have different sounds in different words. However, Chinese spelling could be harder than English. So why do we always think our mother tongue is harder than a foreign language? Because when I was learning French and Japanese, I felt that they were easier than Chinese. That’s weird. As for the printing press, I don’t think the digital technology will change English spelling one day because, in my opinion, English spelling is already fixed, nearly everyone in the world spell in the same way, it could be rather difficult to change all of them.

    • Thanks, Yuan Li! By the time you start learning an additional language – even if you start in preschool, as you did – you already have tons of language learning experience in the mother tongue, and there is so much linguistic knowledge that you can simply transfer on to the learning of any other language 🙂

  • Gegentuul says:

    Diction class ( I had it for both English and traditional Mongolian) is my nightmare too!

    One good thing about knowing the torturous journey of English or any languages is not to lament about/foreground its today’s change; I really enjoyed reading this post!

    • Thanks, Gegentuul! Another thing that dictation teaches you is attention to detail, which I appreciate more and more, particularly as I see it less and less valued in today’s education.

  • David Marjanović says:

    Ah, but there are parts of the English spelling system that relate neither to modern pronunciation nor to etymology. Check this out, especially the list of red herrings.

    • Thanks, David! No doubt about that … my point wasn’t etymology so much as the fact that English no longer has a purely alphabetic script but contains a significant logographic element that you simply need to memorize through practice … the debate around spelling reform is so loaded that I tend to stay away; my sense is that automated spell checkers have completely changed the game, and make spelling reform even less likely.

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